When President Obama addressed the American Society of News Editors convention last month, the real news was what didn’t happen. The watchdogs didn’t bark. No discouraging word from the gathering of 1,000 of the country’s top news people, facing a president whose administration has led a vigorous attack on journalism’s most indispensable asset — its sources.

For years I’ve attended the annual conferences of the Organization of News Ombudsmen, an international group that tries to keep the media honest. But the gathering just held in Montreal was unique. For the first time, ONO’s sessions offered simultaneous translation in three languages.

The arrest of a leading French statesman and politician, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, on charges of sexually assaulting a New York hotel chambermaid became a transatlantic media spectacle when he was photographed — manacled and miserable — being led from a Manhattan lockup. Publishing such pictures is illegal in France, and some commentators there were incensed by the photos of what U.S. reporters call the “perp walk.” That’s when an accused person, if newsworthy, is deliberately marched to arraignment past the cameras.